When the wind is in the east, ‘Tis neither good for man nor beast; When the wind is in the north, The skillful fisher goes not forth; When the wind is in the south, It blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth; When the wind is in the west, Then ’tis at the very best.
Although I can see him still — The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies— It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped it would be To write for my own race And the reality: The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved— And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer— The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream— A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
Billy Collins - whose poetry endears him to me. He wrote a poem about Budapest but this isn't it.
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one—
a painting of a woman on the wall,
a bowl of tangerines on the table—
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,
rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.
But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia
when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend
under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna
sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.
That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.
Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,art
even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.
Gone the salt-washed oyster-shell of sky, the bonxies’ aerobatic jazz, bass riff of tractor and ferry. Gone the chorusline of jiving thrift, the tide’s cool blues, the intemperate applause of gulls. Gone the indigo intermezzi, Morning’s glimmer keeking between midnight’s eyelids.
From a Dark Island Beer box, partans to clean, for tea. I crack claws, scoop meat, dispose of still warm dead-man’s fingers, cut my thumb, lick at the sting of split skin, backtrack to a boat, the Northern Lights, in trouble: from the dark deep its crew conjuring Harpy, Siren, Valkyr.
